Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  Though our defense proved that every illegal action we had participated in on the night of the break-in had been planned by either Capers or Radical Bob, we were found guilty of illegal trespass, breaking and entering, and malicious destruction of federal property. The judge sentenced us to a year in prison, but suspended that sentence due to our youth and obvious idealism. With quiet generosity, the judge gave us a real break.

  When Capers came to the witness chair in the Dock Street Theater, all of us were silent as he picked up the story of his involvement with the trial. Though he told his side of the story well, I could still feel his uneasiness over his part in bringing down his friends. One minute would find him defensive, but in the next he would grow thoughtful as he tried to recall the passions and fears set loose during those harrowing days. With high-strung, nervous advocacy, Capers defended his actions as a form of patriotism and service to his country. When he signed up to work as a government agent, he had no way of knowing how Kent State would draw his closest friends into the trap he had set for the enemies of America.

  “Shyla loved you, Capers,” I heard Ledare say. “Why did you pretend to love her back?”

  “I didn’t pretend,” Capers said, looking over at his ex-wife. “What I felt for Shyla was real. I never learned so much from anyone, never met anyone with such fine instincts for politics. She understood media, always made it work for us. I thought that later I would be able to explain to her what had happened. You know, on some occasion like this. My love for her was perfectly real—hell, we all loved Shyla—we grew up with her. But I was looking at a bigger picture. I thought our country was in trouble. I knew that Communists had infiltrated the antiwar movement. Unlike the rest of you, I had access to the agents.”

  “Your friends weren’t Communists,” Jordan Elliott said. “Jack and I weren’t even political. Mike and Shyla were just against the war.”

  The general answered his son sharply. “You did your duty to your country, Capers. You’ve nothing to answer for.”

  “Capers has always been proud of what he did at Carolina,” Ledare said. “We used to argue about it during our marriage.”

  “I wasn’t proud,” Capers corrected. “I was reconciled. There’s a big difference.”

  “If it wasn’t for you and Shyla, Jordan and I wouldn’t’ve even noticed Kent State,” I said to Capers.

  “I take full responsibility for what I did,” Capers said. “I suggest you two do the same.”

  “You kept me out of the demonstrations,” Mike said to Capers. “You made me the photographer. Said I should record history. Was that because you were protecting me?”

  “You were too impressionable,” Capers said. “I was protecting you from Shyla and your own worst instincts.”

  “So you were setting Shyla up?” Mike asked.

  “She had set herself up. Shyla helped shape the form my radicalism would take. My main focus was Radical Bob.”

  “Ah, the irony,” Bob said.

  “It’s what always happens in bureaucracy,” Capers said.

  “Were you paid a salary?” Jordan asked.

  “Yes. Of course,” said Capers as if surprised by the question. “And I earned it too.”

  As I listened to Capers and the others, it came back to me again how long it had taken me to recover the equilibrium I lost during that trial. I discovered that I did not have a revolutionary bone in my body and if the judge had sentenced me to the front lines of an incountry unit in Vietnam, I would have accepted my duty with gratitude. The prosecution had accused me, day after day, of not loving my country, and that left deep marks on me. My country was what I woke up to every day, what I saw and breathed in around me, it was what I knew and loved without putting a tag on it, and what I would die for if it were ever in jeopardy and I heard it call my name. In the stronghold of my realest self, I was forced by the trial to confront the man I was and the one I was on the way to becoming.

  After the trial ended, Mike had met Capers Middleton outside the courtroom and had taken three photographs of Capers with his arm around Radical Bob. Then he had set his Nikons down carefully and had punched Capers in the jaw. Onlookers had needed to pull Mike off his old friend.

  • • •

  Throughout the long winter of 1971 that followed, I went through a period of self-inquiry and licking my wounds as I reviewed the damage I had done to my life. It was during this time that Shyla and I gravitated toward each other. As I look back on it I suppose our dance together was inevitable. We were like moons that gave off no light, attracted to the same illusory orbit. Shyla could barely recover her self-respect after having slept with Capers and having shared every secret with him for more than a year. It was not that he had lied about the war that most troubled her, it was that he had told her every night about his love for her, his undying admiration for all she stood for, his adoration of her body, and his ardent desire that they spend their entire lives together. That she could not sense such treachery and dissimulation in her own lover disturbed her far more than that he’d been secretly working for the state. It was not any residue of Capers and his bad faith she feared, but she did not know how to ever regain trust in herself and her own judgments again. Shyla had always considered herself reliable and incorruptible, but never had she thought of herself as an easy mark or gullible to the point of dishonor. She could easily accept the legal consequences of her own actions, but she could not bear being made a laughingstock or a fool for love. So she turned to me and I turned to her, neither of us knowing that we were both keeping a ruthless appointment with a bridge in Charleston.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  When Jordan took the seat on the Dock Street stage next to my father I realized that now all the pieces and small fragments of what happened to him would become a whole. I had always been hesitant to ask too many questions about a period of time both of us had found contaminated, and he had not volunteered any information. As Jordan spoke, I felt him relax under the steely gaze of his father for the first time. He spoke in a voice that was matter-of-fact, businesslike. His re-creation of events came easily to him and I suddenly remembered why my church taught that confession was good for the soul. As he talked, all of us leaned forward to hear each word articulated by this remote, soft-spoken man. Even the general leaned forward in his chair.

  “It was almost immediately after I arrived at Bull Street that I was thrown into solitary confinement in a room without furniture. The doctors had given me drugs to calm my fury over being committed, but I had continued to scream at the nurses, night attendants, and other patients, so they isolated me as much as possible. They also increased the dosage of my drugs, until I was barely coherent. When I was returned to the ward, no visitors were allowed, and I could receive letters from no one except my parents.

  “I’m not sure when it was, but soon after, I received the first of four shock treatments, which calmed me almost to the point of insentience. I shuffled among the main populace of the most serious psychotics for months, wandering through a thick haze of cigarette smoke past men poleaxed by Thorazine. But what had looked like madness to the doctors and nurses was my inability to come to terms with my father’s betrayal. The shock treatments made me forget, but eventually memory returned, slowly, and when it did it hurt. When I remembered my father’s slap and his saliva running down my face, I tried to kill myself by hanging from a belt I had stolen from a sleeping guard. Later I tried to hang myself with bed sheets and was treated to another round of shock treatments. My mother came to visit me twice a week.

  “I stayed at Bull Street until the following May. I had been there almost a year when they let me go. My release caught everyone by surprise. Especially me. In the middle of February, I had started cooperating with the staff completely. I turned on the charm. By the time I left, everyone loved me. I had gone on a campaign to get out of there. I even organized a blood drive for the Red Cross on my ward. I took out the blood of half the patients in the ward because they trusted me more
than the nurses. After that, everyone trusted me, patients and doctors alike. I bided my time. I smiled at everyone. Then I secretly began to prepare for what I was going to do when I got out.”

  As we listened to Jordan we began to see the world as he saw it back then, after a long season of psychotic drugs and shock treatment.

  It was during his stay in solitary, he said, that the attraction to monastic withdrawal began its pull on him. Back on the wards, he discovered the power of words to calm the terror of the meek and the distraught. He began to speak like a priest during this period and hid from everyone the terrible hatred that moved like a virus in his heart. The priest in him was born, but the warrior still seethed beneath. The only voices he heard in those long months in prison were those of his father and Capers. Their voices came to him nightly, taunting him.

  When he left the hospital his plan was set. He wrote a postcard to his parents telling them that he was hitchhiking to California, where he wanted to take up surfing seriously again. Then he caught a ride with a policeman who was camping on the beach at St. Michael’s Island with his girlfriend and who let him off at the gate on Pollock Island. There he introduced himself to the corporal on duty as General Elliott’s son and caught a ride with the deputy provost marshal to the PX, and from there he walked to the general’s quarters. The house was huge and mainly unoccupied and he spent the night in the unused servant’s quarters. Noiselessly he hid among the man-sized azaleas and watched his parents eat dinner with no inkling that he was observing their every bite.

  For the next two days, he said, he prepared his long answer to his father’s humiliation of him on the courthouse steps. In his father’s workshop, he made a small incendiary bomb with two flashlight batteries to power the small but effective detonator. He configured the architecture of the bomb carefully, borrowing freely from the supply of gunpowder his old man used to make musket balls for the Civil War rifle used by one of their ancestors who rode with Wade Hampton. He wanted it lightweight and volatile, but safe enough for him to carry around by hand until he set the timer. He drew elaborate maps and worked out his plan in his mind again and again, making the necessary corrections until the proper time for action presented itself.

  When his mother went out during the day and the maid was cleaning the upstairs, he moved quietly in the back door of the house and stole food from the pantry that looked forlorn and forgotten. When the maid had gone, he would sit at his mother’s vanity and take in all her smells, the way he did as a boy. He even spent one night in his room because he wanted to capture again the feeling of being there. He could have forgiven his father every crime but one; he could not forgive him for stealing his entire childhood.

  When his parents went away for a weekend at Highlands in the North Carolina mountains he made his final arrangements. He wrote a letter to them telling them every single thing he planned to do and why. He told them what he believed deeply in and everything he had come to feel about the world. He stated his opposition to the Vietnam War and admitted it had only grown stronger during his enforced imprisonment in Columbia. The only weakness that he acknowledged in his antiwar stance was his unwillingness to fight violence with violence of his own. To his mother, he left his undying love and gratitude. To his father, he left his corpse and his loathing and thanks for absolutely nothing. The letter, the rambling, embarrassingly rhetorical, half-cocked, egomaniacal relic of the sixties, he left in his mother’s jewelry box.

  On the Saturday night he chose to act, he walked the half-mile to the marina carrying his surfboard over his head. The night before he had placed the bomb beneath the front seat of the boat he had reserved for the weekend, by phone, in the name of his father’s adjutant’s son. He had checked out the engine by test-riding it the night before. He packed it with extra tanks of gas, junk food, and Coca-Cola, took a bottle of Wild Turkey from his father’s liquor cabinet, then loaded bags of blood he had stolen from the donors at the state hospital. He packed the four pints of blood in newspaper and cotton gauze, then placed them in a small carry-on bag that he put in the fish locker. The blood was all type O, his own.

  He described to us the care with which he dressed in his father’s uniform, giving himself the rank of major, and placing all emblems of rank and all insignia in their proper places. He spit-shined his father’s shoes. His hair was already cut in Marine Corps fashion thanks to the strict rules of his ward. Studying himself in his father’s full-length mirror, he got a sudden glimpse of the life his father had wanted for him. He was a fine-looking Marine, but admitted that on this night, he was a dangerous, angry man who was thinking unclearly, his rage undercutting all undertones of reason.

  In the general’s staff car, he drove, erect in the rainy night. Several soldiers saluted when they saw the stars on the front fender and no one, he remarked wryly, returned a salute as sharply as Jordan Elliott, bred to the Corps. He drove the five miles to the Waterford Air Station, received the snappy salute of a PFC, then proceeded toward the airstrip and the hangars where the great warplanes were at rest. There were lights on in the guardhouses and officers on duty. But checking every squadron, looking for movement or signs of life, he saw that everything was hunkered down.

  He said it took him a while to decide whether he wanted to blow up an A-4 or a Phantom jet. He loved the clean lines and beauty of both. Once, he explained, he had wanted to be a Marine aviator more than anything in the world. He wanted to be the flyboy who could come swiftly from the sky to rescue his father’s beleaguered, pinned-down regiment. That was a lifetime ago but thinking about the past made him nostalgic, detoured him from concentrating on the mission at hand. But it bothered him, he explained to us, to blow up a plane he had once dreamt of flying, as though it would destroy that small part of his childhood that he still could return to without tears.

  As he drove his father’s car past the Bumblebee Squadron, the Shamrock Squadron, the shapes became grotesque and vaporous. And then, he saw it: a DC-3 parked at the end of the runway, a forlorn remnant of a past era of flight. Perfect for the point he wanted to make to his father. He pulled the car off the road behind some large shrubbery. He had packed the bomb carefully and now rewrapped the package with waterproof cloth before he moved out toward the plane. Only the lights of the runway lit his way and he felt invisible, he said, even to himself.

  Swiftly and efficiently, he taped the package to the bottom of the DC-3’s fuselage near the gas tank. He set the timer on the clock to go off at four o’clock that morning. He did not remember returning to Pollock Island nor did he remember parking his father’s car in the garage and returning the extra key to its hiding place beneath a paint can.

  In his parents’ room again, he hung up his father’s uniform in a closet. He went to a photograph album and took from it a favorite photograph of himself and his mother. Before he replaced his father’s shoes, he cleaned and spit-shined them again.

  Going to his father’s bathroom, he stole a fresh packet of Gillette blades from his medicine cabinet. With a tube of his mother’s lipstick, he wrote the word Jordan on his father’s shaving kit.

  Jordan turned to face the General: “I wanted you to know I had used the house as the base of operations.”

  Going to his mother’s vanity, he read again his suicide note which he thought sounded rather shrill. He hoped he would have the courage to kill himself when the time came, but if not, he had an alternate plan of action. Checking his watch, he went to his room and changed into a bathing suit and his sweat clothes. Walking through the house for a last time, he took a final inventory of the things that had accompanied him through childhood. “I was still running when I reached the marina and untied the boat from its moorings and let it drift out with the tide. I did not start the motor until I was almost to the main channel in the sound. I was past the three-mile limit when the DC-3 exploded.” When he told us this, no one moved a single muscle in the Dock Street Theater. It looked as though all of us had forgotten how to breathe.

  I kn
ew all too well what else was going on that night. Just before midnight, Corporal Willet Egglesby met with the daughter of Colonel Harold Pruitt at a secret rendezvous in the breezeway of a vacant house located three houses away from the one where Bonnie Pruitt had escaped through her bedroom window. Their love affair had not gone over well with the rank-conscious Ellen Pruitt, who hounded her malleable husband to the point where he forbade his seventeen-year-old daughter to date her ardent corporal. Unbearable tension had become commonplace in the Pruitt household, until the corporal discovered the DC-3 on the runway near her house. Corporal Egglesby and the young Pruitt girl were making love when the bomb detonated and the two youngsters were buried side by side in the National Cemetery located down the road in Waterford.

  Yet in the extraordinary mayhem caused by the plane’s explosion, and in the reaction of the Marine Fire Brigade as well as of Waterford’s Fire Station, much evidence was lost—there were so many firemen tracking through the scene of the fire, which no one suspected to be a crime. The bodies of Bonnie Pruitt and Corporal Egglesby were not found until late the next afternoon by naval experts flown in to examine the wreckage. When these same experts went to the house of Colonel Pruitt, the distraught and guilt-ridden Ellen Pruitt produced three suicide notes that Bonnie had written to her parents, declaring that she would kill herself if her parents insisted on keeping her apart from Willet Egglesby. Corporal Egglesby himself was the son of a highway construction engineer from West Virginia who was an expert with explosives. After a thorough investigation, the naval experts agreed that the two young lovers had made a suicide pact together and that the corporal had assembled a more-than-functional bomb to carry out their dark pledge to each other. In the experts’ report, they lamented in the stiff-jointed language of career bureaucrats that the DC-3 gas tanks were full when the bomb went off. It was also noted that the couple was making love when the explosion occurred and that intercourse was not often linked to such obvious despair.